


found: wanting

by charcoalsuns



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Character Growth, F/M, Gen, canon compliant past season two
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-27
Updated: 2016-07-27
Packaged: 2018-07-26 01:21:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7554670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charcoalsuns/pseuds/charcoalsuns
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As they walk, he considers <i>motivations</i> in his head like so many new leaves, late and fragile in the summer heat, and wonders where there exists one printed with his name. Or, maybe, one he might take a pen to himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	found: wanting

**Author's Note:**

  * For [irishbandlover23](https://archiveofourown.org/users/irishbandlover23/gifts).



> Ahhh, hello! This was a challenge in itself to figure out with such open prompts, but after glimpsing a few past tags on your tumblr, I wrote this with a focus on character growth (and as requested, no angst!). I learned quite a bit about both Yachi and Tsukishima along the way, while endeavoring to wrap my head around their personalities and in thinking more about their present and potential interactions.
> 
> Happy HQ Summer Hols!!

  


She’s here again. 

Yachi Hitoka, the first-year girl from class five, with a tiny ponytail and limbs like a nervous sapling, trembling from a wind that’s intangible in this stuffy, persistent oven they call _practice_. 

She stands apart from the rest of them, an additional cautionary distance away from the sideline; watches them run and jump and dive all over both courtsides and, because that isn’t enough, around the edge, too. By the end of the afternoon, her face is as flushed as if she’d been sweating right beside them. 

Try as he isn’t, Tsukishima can’t help but witness her conversation with Hinata, noises and gestures, excitement over nothing. Though she very much seems like she wants to join them, her expression falls the slightest bit, wishful but hesitant, when he suggests it for the dozenth time. 

Listening from as many steps away, Tsukishima reminds himself that he doesn’t care, whether she wants to be a part of the team or not.

  


☾*

  


The other school is due to arrive in less than five minutes, and his sports tape is in the club room. A short, inaudible sigh on his tongue, Tsukishima turns toward the corner of the gym at one side of the stage, where the water bottles are freshly filled and lined up across the floor. The team’s communal supply bag should be around there. 

Already, the room sounds like the primate exhibit of a zoo he would never visit, and however inaccurate, the bunch of bananas Coach Ukai sometimes brings them from his store is a fitting presence in their midst. He blinks away a smirk – no point if there’s no one to see it – and refrains from rolling his eyes. 

He closes them, instead. 

When he’s breathed through his nose for a few seconds and refocused on his temporary destination, Yachi has joined him. 

Well. _Joined_. He glances down a diagonal to where she’s stopped, a meter and a half away, and acknowledges her with a slight nod before folding himself toward the supply bag. 

“Um,” she says, from a few steps closer. 

He looks up at her, feeling one of his eyebrows rise on its own in question. Maybe she’s less intimidated when people don’t seem as tall. 

“Are you looking for I can help with?” 

Maybe not. 

He turns back to the roll of sports tape, nestled behind several soft-rough bandages and enough Air Salonpas to knock a person unconscious. “Just this,” he says, and takes it out. 

“Oh,” she says. “I thought… Well, it’s nothing. I’ll leave you to it!” 

So she does, and Tsukishima tells himself it’s what he wanted in the first place. He tears off the end of the tape, the rest of its unwound length already wrapped around the last two fingers of his right hand. Just a minor bend at an awkward angle earlier, when Azumane had powered past him with a near inhuman kill. 

He’d be fine without taping them, really, and it’s not comfortable anyway, having his movements restricted on even such a small scale. But they have a match now. 

Practice notwithstanding.

  


☾*

  


He’s in his brother’s car, schoolbag in his lap, headphones over his ears like a sign on a locked doorknob. He looks straight through the dashboard as the car winds through the streets, and it is quiet. 

Three blocks into town, there’s a red light, the crosswalk occupied by a young parade. They’re racing across the white lines, primary colors of their backpacks overlapping as they dart around each other to be the first to get to— 

A poster, taped right next to the dry cleaners’ open glass doors. 

Tsukishima is looking straight through the passenger side window, and the hissing emptiness between his lungs is deafening, asphyxiating. 

He wrenches his gaze back to the middle of the crosswalk. 

His fingers, crossed in place and lying atop a handful of packed textbooks, dig stiffly against each other like they’ve been ordered not to move. 

_Of course,_ he thinks, bitter and unsurprised. 

Then: _Who?_

  


☾*

  


“YACHI-SAAAN!” 

“Oh! Good morning, Hinata!” 

“Yachi-san, I saw your poster on my way home yesterday! It’s amazing! Incredible!”

“Y-You think so? I’m glad!”

“I know so! Thanks for asking to put me on it, and thanks for putting it together and making it look so awesome for us, and thanks for becoming our manager!” 

“I— That’s— Not at all! When I watch all of you play, when I see how determined and focused you are, it’s really amazing. It makes me feel so… so…! You know! And if you’ll have me, I’d like to become a part of it. I want to do everything I can to help you!”

  
  
  


* * *

  
  


  
_Everything I can_ …

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


He doesn’t want to do anything. 

He doesn’t want to be here, playing against opponents they’re certain to lose against, and sprinting countless penalties when they do. He doesn’t want to take another step onto those bright, scuffed floors. 

He doesn’t want to quit.

  


☾*

  


Then: 

_That moment_.

Against every stone in the barricade he started building when he was ten, the idea grinds at him like a needle with a point made of diamond. Tsukishima doesn’t know what signals to look for, what signs will lead him to that triumph of strength, and the uncertainty clouds his brain, makes clutter of the neat compartments he boxes his thoughts into. 

His safe ground is crumbling under his feet, and the only direction to go is on the same climb as everyone else, after all. 

“—almost landed in before, didn’t it?” Yachi is saying between bites of _omurice_. “And you’re practicing so much, Yamaguchi-kun, you’ll get it soon!” 

Yamaguchi has a hand on the back of his neck, stammering himself pink as if he’s never been sure of his actions in his life. A needle in his mind, Tsukishima holds back a laugh, amused and ill-timed. He thinks of _pride,_ and the elusive, blurred outline of success Yamaguchi is chasing with every surety he possesses. 

He’ll get it, eventually. 

And while Tsukishima still cannot quite understand that motivation, while he is too full of pride himself to knock down his protective walls, he feels curiosity, now – a seed planted in stone; a small, tired longing he has decided to water with his own sweat. 

He listens as Yamaguchi describes the kind of serve he wants to make without missing, one day, and finishes the rest of his soup. Not as much salt as usual, tonight. 

“How are Hinata and Kageyama doing?” Yamaguchi asks, and like a light switch flipped to blinding, Tsukishima has to remind himself: He is not doing this because he wants to be like them. 

“Well,” answers Yachi, pausing as she wipes her plate with her napkin, “they’re working really hard, but they’re having a difficult time matching each other’s movements.” She tilts her head to look at Tsukishima, then, smiling for no reason he can fathom. “So, I’ve been helping Kageyama-kun with his tosses, and Hinata… Hinata is practicing on his own. I’m sure they’ll get their new quick to work soon, too!” 

“Yeah, they will,” says Yamaguchi. The two of them grin at each other, excited over _something,_ and Tsukishima does not try to make sense of their diamond words. 

_Such faith,_ he thinks. _Would that I could carry the same_.

  


☾*

  


The mass of air between Shinzen’s sprint hill and their main gymnasium is the thickest discomfort Tsukishima has ever been subjected to. Even without him glaring at the ground with his hands on his knees, gasping his breaths under control, his glasses are slipping down his nose faster than he can wipe them both dry; once he locates a section of his towel that still is. Despite the hundred-strong stench that must be surrounding him, he can’t smell a thing, and the back of his mouth feels like a crater full of sand. 

“Here you are, Tsukishima-kun,” comes a voice a short way above him. He squints toward the sun to see Yachi holding a water bottle out toward him. 

“Thanks,” he says, shifting upright as evenly as he can, accepting the drink with care. 

Her smile is never far away, and as she hurries back to collect the others’ bottles, as she weighs each in her hand to check which ones need to be refilled and pushes her own sweaty fringe from her forehead, Tsukishima wonders, again: 

What is keeping her so motivated to help them? He doesn’t know anything about poster design, but he remembers like yesterday the moment his attention was taken in by the product of her work; he’s certain such carefully layered images and text would have taken much longer than an extra school assignment to edit and finalize together. 

And he remembers, like a second star in the daytime sky, the expression on her face when she started coming to their practices. Awe, wordless wonder. As if their movements were anything but Sisyphean, as if she were him, ten years and change ago, watching the sport for the first time and wanting, _wanting_ to be a part of it, too. 

He turns the water bottle upside-down between his teeth, and drinks. 

His throat is still dry.

  


☾*

  


He wants to ask her, wants to listen to her reasons for joining them when he cannot find an unabstract reason that he stays. 

( _I’m good enough at it, and it’s not difficult to continue being just that_. Those thoughts, self-centered and blind, have stopped applying to his routine. Or, maybe he never should have let them apply at all.)

He wants to ask, but he can only ask his questions away from his teammates, and he doesn’t know how to bring these to her light. 

So he lets it slide, for now, for another day, for good.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


The night before the first Spring High preliminaries, Tsukishima leaves his curtains open when he goes to bed. 

Through the glass, he can see the branches of their _sakura_ tree, crooked, swaying shadows before indistinct clouds. Behind them, above them, like a ghost light in the sky, the waning moon reflects across his room, and the uniform jersey hanging on his wall takes center stage. 

For once, for only his eyes. 

Will he be wearing that number when— if he finds that moment? 

Tsukishima’s headphones are curled on his desk, unplugged, and through the crack between his door and the hardwood floor, through the dimmed hallways with their silent picture frames, he can hear the faint chorus of the TV, of his brother and mother laughing quietly at one story or another. 

He wonders how long Akiteru will be home, this time. He hadn’t asked. 

He thinks about acceptance; not forgiveness, when there was nothing to forgive but their own enthusiasm. About the idea of _being satisfied,_ one that floats somewhere above them both, much higher than the basketball hoop beside their backyard tree, more insubstantial than the pale, phantom light from the moon. 

The world didn’t end when he was ten, and it hadn’t ended two weeks ago, when he’d heard and admitted, silently, just how much he’d been fooling himself still. 

He’s in a place where, he knows, however it grates at him: 

If he wants, he can give his all, too.

  


☾*

  


When the second school term begins, both Takeda-sensei and the third years are more mindful of the younger team members’ grades, and in an unfortunate result, the prospect of _tutoring_ is brought up again. Interminably, like the act itself would be, were Tsukishima to agree to it. 

As it is, he does not. He leaves the clubroom-turned-study-hall in the evening with as little subtlety as possible, citing loudly and deliberately just how much spare time he’ll have when he gets home, because _he_ doesn’t need to spend additional hours on understanding their rudimentary lessons. 

And when he leaves, while Kageyama’s dark muttering and Hinata’s squawking trail behind him like toilet paper stuck to the bottom of his shoe, he steps away from the echoes of his provocation. 

He drops the smirk from his face, unangles his eyebrows from their practiced tilt, and refocuses. 

He isn’t going to have spare time tonight. 

Akiteru’s team only meets at night during the week – all the members are out of high school, and many have also graduated from university; most are busy at their own jobs from morning to evening. 

No one at Karasuno needs to know he plans to seek out extra practice for his blocking, and it’s easy enough to keep it that way.

  


☾*

  


It keeps for less than a week. 

The sky is still bright, hours yet before dusk, and Tsukishima is surprised to see he’s not the only one leaving practice early. Today, but at all, really. 

He keeps his expression neutral and continues walking straight ahead, past the half-empty bicycle racks, past a scattered sheaf of blank notebook papers someone has left on the concrete. _A waste,_ he thinks. He makes no move to pick them up. 

When their paths meet before the school’s front gates, he gives Yachi a small nod in greeting, shortens his stride a little so she can walk next to him without having to speed up. 

“Tsukishima-kun, hello,” she says, hair falling back over her star-patterned schoolbag as she looks up at him. “Are you going home early, too?” 

“Mm,” Tsukishima says in answer, and wonders if he’s being rude. 

He isn’t one for this kind of conversation, easy and open and earnest. He doesn’t really know what to say, unless it’s a single, dry line in reaction or explanation, colored by the only tone he can produce – a private amusement, a judgment he won’t bother to justify for anyone else. It’s enough to keep people away, to ensure they won’t see him as anything but his conscious intention. Enough to prevent them from making subsequent judgments of their own. 

But Yachi has heard him build fistfuls of precise, calculated slingshots every day for the past two months, and here she still is, despite his personal sport, despite his present silence, walking beside him on the road away from school like the two of them are _friends_. 

And on account of how he doesn’t mind her company, on account of how she doesn’t seem to mind his, he supposes they are. 

“It’s the first time I’ve known you to leave early,” he says, because Yachi deserves more than thoughts she can’t hear. 

If she’s surprised, she shows it. When he glances over to see her reaction, her eyes have widened, a quiet breath escaping between her lips. There is not the slightest hint of judgment in her smile. 

“I ordered a few new prints of the donation poster,” she says. “They’re finished today, and I’m going now to pick them up before the shop closes!” 

“I see,” Tsukishima says, thumbing the edge of his pocketed phone, and thinks about what additional donation posters mean. That Yachi, too, is hoping for their volleyball team to make it far enough that they’ll need to collect more money to continue even further. That she, too, wants to win. 

“I kept hesitating before I sent the design back in this time,” Yachi is saying. “The longer I looked at it, the more things I wanted to change; the font sizes, the filter levels, the places where I blended the different images together. But in the end, I didn’t change anything.” She grins, one of her fingers tapping a self-aware beat upon her cheek. “I left it as it was, because I thought: if I make a new design another day, I can change things there, instead.” 

Tsukishima doesn’t smile back, but he hums a short affirmation so she knows he’s listening. “That’s one way to look at it,” he says, and as the words march from his mouth, he feels them fall flat on their heads. Humorless as a closed door, a chill and a scythe to Yachi’s blossoming openness. He doesn’t have to wonder, now – he knows he’s being rude. 

But he’s starting to think she must be a miracle, because she doesn’t falter, and she is surely growing from tougher roots than either of them are aware of. “Yes,” she says, watching carefully for cars as they cross a street. “But I don’t think it’s the only way. Only that I’ve learned for myself – if I’m stuck on something, no matter how small, I have to make a choice and go on with it. Otherwise, I’ll stay stuck there.” 

“…I see,” Tsukishima says. He doesn’t think Yachi can hear just how cleanly her thoughts are echoing through the clutter of his own, or realize how readily she’s taken to a mindset he is still finding difficult to accept. 

As they walk, though, as he considers _motivations_ in his head like so many new leaves, late and fragile in the summer heat, he thinks: 

Perhaps he wouldn’t mind, if Yachi did know of the uncertainties he shares, and the fledgling goals he has penciled over them. 

But for now, he keeps those old-new scraps of paper to himself.

  


☾*

  


“Where are you headed, Tsukishima-kun?”

“…”

“Oh! Oh, I’m sorry, you don’t have to tell me, it’s your business, of course—“ 

“Practice.”

“—you don’t… Practice?” 

“My older brother is on a team. They meet in the city gymnasium some weeknights, and I’m joining them when I can.” 

“I see! So, it’s extra practice, then!” 

“…You could say that.”

  


☾*

  


His forearms are battered pink by the time he changes his shoes to go home. When he stands upright, a dozen pinpricks vibrate up his shins and explode in his knees. He is tired and irritated and cannot get home to a hot shower soon enough, and somehow, at the same time, he is set on coming back. 

The idea of stopping Ushijima is laughable. Tsukishima has never watched him from the opposite side of the same court, nor will he ever, but he has read his growing bio in the monthly volleyball magazine Akiteru had never ended his subscription to; he has seen his accolades and experiences, his recorded statistics, and he knows his power has only and will only devastate anyone who is unfortunate enough to block his way. 

He doesn’t need to play against him to know he will lose. 

But despite that knowledge, or in literal spite of it, Tsukishima practices. As the days shorten by cooling degrees, he marks new compartments in his mind, fills their gaps with techniques he learns from watching, from trying. He takes to his form with a red pen and ingrains corrections into his following movements. Endless, winding, _vain,_ the stairs he’s landed himself on behind the rest of the team stretch far above his head, further than even wings might climb. 

He is not aiming to stop Ushijima. He is not aiming to win. Even now, he is not aiming for anything other than the single step above the one where he has already planted his front foot. 

He keeps the next flight of stairs in his upward periphery, does not try to run too fast, and when he is short of breath, of energy, of fight – he remembers the paper stars his friends and teammates and unfortunate acquaintances have shared, and unfolds his own resolve as he moves onward.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


The last Thursday of October, they’re back at the public gymnasium in Sendai, sitting with their bags and selves grouped beside a wall of the lobby. Not fifteen minutes from one rowdy atmosphere to another, Tsukishima is wishing for the headphones he’s left next to the completed schoolwork on his desk. 

And as the sounds of boisterous laughter assault his ears, he thinks he might bring his music player along with them, too, for once. 

“Don’t murder anyone just yet, Tsukishima.” Unruffled as ever, Ennoshita smiles at him, and Tsukishima gives him a noncommittal stare over the tops of his arms, folded with purposeful nonchalance across his knees. 

“I make no promises, Ennoshita-san,” he says. 

On his other side, Yamaguchi lets out a quiet snort, though he has his own arms wrapped around his stomach, his head turned toward the hallway Hinata had scrambled down minutes earlier. 

In the same tradition, Tsukishima does not say anything to him. He trusts Yamaguchi won’t actually empty his breakfast onto the floor between them, but he keeps half a glance on him still, to make sure he’s okay. 

“Yamaguchi-kun, are you all right?” Yachi sounds as concerned as she is nervous, and her fingers wring together gently as she crouches next to them. “Do you need medicine, or water, or—” 

“Ah, no, Yachi-san,” says Yamaguchi. “I think I’m okay. Thank you, though.” 

Yachi shakes her head, ponytail flipping at the side of her head. “Not at all,” she says, “I’m feeling nervous, too, now, even though I tried to talk myself through it this morning!” 

Yamaguchi looks less sick already, as he relaxes into soft laughter in answer to Yachi’s bright, warm smile. “You might have as little to worry about as I do,” he says. “I’ll probably just be watching for these matches as well; I don’t know why I’m so jumpy.” 

“Just the atmosphere, maybe,” Yachi says, shifting herself down to sit with them as they wait. “Sometimes I think nerves are like a school of fish, so quick to turn in the same direction as the others.” 

Yamaguchi giggles, and silently, in his own mild amusement, Tsukishima thanks her. 

“Well,” Yamaguchi says. He glances over, with a beginning snicker that makes Tsukishima take back his thanks almost immediately. “Tsukki must be the one that swims on its own, or goes in the opposite direction, then! He’s starting, but he’s never nervous at all.” 

Tsukishima glares – not at Yachi, since this isn’t _really_ her doing – and is rewarded by Yamaguchi decidedly neglecting to react to his displeasure, as he has neglected to do for about as long as they’ve known each other. 

And Yachi, for all her hand-wringing, is giggling with him. 

With a bit of a sigh, Tsukishima says, “If I were a fish that tried to swim on its own like that, I’d be eaten. Any predator would pick me out in an instant; it would defeat one of the main purposes of swimming in a school in the first place.” 

Yamaguchi shakes his head at him as he laughs, either admiring or amused, though probably both in some combination, and the sight of Yachi’s grin warms the back of his neck like a sunbeam.

  


☾*

  


_Never nervous_. 

_Always so cool, that Tsukishima-kun, nothing ever gets to him_. 

Untrue, but just as unknown, and this, too, is part of his intention. 

He guards his nerve endings with a wall of coldest stone, hunkers down behind when he knows he is threatened. He is fine, it is fine, it is _expected;_ he will feign certainty and disguise it as realism, let others’ chips fall where they may, because there is no game for which he is willing to gamble. 

This has not changed, though something else, he admits, finally has. 

He has learned to make his defenses evolve, and while he still has not found a reason to stretch his neck out from behind them, his shifting, rising ground gives him a vantage point that is more functional than before.

  


☾*

  


Following a victory they are calling penultimate, a goal is made official. 

Sawamura has an air about him that commands without words, and when he draws himself up with deliberate strength, conviction in both stance and speech, it is impossible to argue against him. 

Very nearly impossible. 

Were Tsukishima another person, he would believe, too – he would carry their collective will like a thunderclap in his chest; he would fight toward its fulfillment until he had exhausted every last drop of sweat he could shake from his skin. 

Tsukishima is not another person. He does not believe they can win tomorrow, least of all win the entire national tournament. 

Especially as a certain two’s yells are crashing into each other and ricocheting off the gymnasium walls with impossible confidence. 

Even though he can look anywhere in the room, on every face of every teammate he has trained with for half a year now, and see their hope and excitement and _faith,_ somehow, pushing forward like there are neither nerves nor boundaries left to stop them. 

Even as his unmoved gaze happens to fall upon Yachi, her clasped hands, and the attentive way she listens to the rest of the team’s plans for their next match, letting the light in her expression grow. 

Tsukishima makes his own plans, silently, meticulously. He does not care either way, but he will do everything he can to help them win.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


One step past the next, one layer of impatience built on another, one touch, one touch, one touch. 

He adapts his plans, and _executes_.

The ball slams to the ground, undefended. 

Fully defended.

  
  
  
  


  
_Just one point_.

  
  
  
  
  


And with it: so, too, he kills the apathetic creature that had seeped through his mind, and lent pedestals to his dogged detachment. 

He wants to be here. 

He wants to win. 

He wants to keep going.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


Tsukishima is instructed to keep the splint on for at least the next week. He is strongly advised not to partake in intense physical activity, unless he wishes to aggravate his injury even more than he already has. 

He sits behind a makeshift stack of cushions on a score table, angles his folding chair a distance away from the court, presses a softening ice pack against the last finger of his right hand. He feels no desire to cast any of it away and run onto the court to rejoin practice, and internally, he sighs in relief. That match had broken ground for everyone involved; he admits to a slight apprehension that the fractures would have changed him, too. 

(He is glad for this window of rest, and if he is feeling the smallest, most negligible tug of restlessness from how much more he knows there is for him to learn, he keeps it to himself.)

Yachi has a plastic freezer bag with her when she finds him there, history text open beside his elevated hand. 

“More ice, Tsukishima-kun?” she asks, and he accepts the bag with a quiet _thank you_. This far into the afternoon, with a few hours still until his next meal, he can only numb the lingering pain as much as possible. 

A metal star charm swings from the end of Yachi’s mechanical pencil as she writes, her hand neat as a font and several times brighter. Tsukishima dictates the rest of his homework answers without trouble, and stays only inwardly endeared by the way she pokes her tongue past a corner of her mouth when she concentrates. 

Yachi places his books carefully back into his schoolbag after they complete the last problem set, returning to the folding chair next to his for however much longer it will be, before the rest of the team returns from their run. 

Neither of them are the kind who feel compelled to recount an absence of words, but Yachi has her hands folded across her knees, thumbs fidgeting soundlessly against each other, and he has come to associate the unconscious movement with her questing self, holding onto a question. 

And because he has nothing he would prefer to do, because he doesn’t mind, talking with her about both theoretical and practical plays like puzzles they might both solve, he looks over, and _invites_.

  


☾*

  


Later, he finally asks: 

“Why did you decide to join the volleyball club?” 

Yachi’s hands have untwined, busy writing definitions and situational examples in her notebook of volleyball terms, and at his sudden question, she stills, halfway through an entry on _time differentials_. 

“I mean, you’d never played before, right?” he adds, and at a shake of her head, “What made you want to help, and to learn all these things?” 

Yachi taps the rounded clicker of her pencil against her cheek. “I don’t think I’d ever have considered it for myself,” she says, “if Shimizu-senpai hadn’t come to me and asked if I’d help. And I was so nervous when I first watched your practices; I didn’t think I’d survive! Then I watched you play that practice match, with even more energy and even more concentration, as if it were part of an official tournament, and for those moments, all I wanted was to keep watching.” 

This, Tsukishima knows, or at least has observed. But he listens without comment as Yachi speaks, holding their new leaves toward harmless sunlight. 

“I always made sure to study as much as I needed, and keep things at home clean and ready for my mom while she was busy working, but…” She shrugs the smallest shrug he’s ever seen, traces her finger around the edge of her notebook. “I’d never chosen to try my very hardest at one thing. Seeing how passionate so many of you were, to work so hard for this, it made me want to try, too, if I could.” 

“So many of us, huh,” Tsukishima says in dead tones, ashes over his understanding. 

“Um! No, well,” Yachi tries, hands rising like sparrows to wave as quickly as she shakes her head. “I’m sure you had your own reasons for playing, different from Hinata and Kageyama-kun, and now…” 

Tsukishima adjusts his bag of ice. “I’m not like either of them, now, either,” he says, frowning. 

Yachi only looks at him, expectantly, a smile peeking past her eyes, as if she can see right through him and finds—

“I wanted to try, as well.” He looks away, toward his crossed ankles, resting next to his closed schoolbag. “Someone told me I might actually come to _enjoy_ volleyball, if I had a certain sort of _moment,_ and I was curious. And… it happened, I suppose, and I found I wanted to take myself through to the end. Wherever the end really is.” 

“So you did,” Yachi says, and her smile has overflowed far too easily. The effect stretches gently across the space between their chairs; colors Tsukishima’s reserve, until he has to remind himself not to allow such satisfaction into his thoughts. 

It nearly works. 

He glances over at her, nods. “So did you,” he says, and lets the leaves turn.

  


☾*

  


He’s here again. 

Tsukishima Kei, class 1-4, glasses changed for prescription goggles and limbs too long to not ache every moment he is aware of them. 

He keeps a roll of sports tape with his knee pads and indoor trainers, in a pocket of the jacket he sets aside when it gets too warm in the gymnasium. It’s mid-November, and all of them are sweating like it’s the beginning of August in Saitama. He’ll cramp right up if he stays still, so he continues moving, and while not every step can be a clear advance, every step is one of many that take him closer, with more knowledge, to being better than he was. 

Behind one sideline, Yachi marks a dozen separate pairs of tallies for each of their attempted and successful kills. 

Tsukishima takes his place at the center of the net; stays aware, peripherally, as he focuses on the ball, running and discarding split-second situations in his mind before he decides where to move, how to win. 

He jumps straight up, and reaches forward.

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> /takes many deep breaths
> 
> I hope this was to your enjoyment, and thank you for reading!


End file.
